Iraq

Historian Salim Yaqub says instability in the Middle East can be traced back to economic stagnation, authoritarian leaders, widespread frustration among the people, and a long history of Western intervention.

Mateo Farzaneh was recently visiting the Iranian city of Khorramshahr, a border city that put up a battle against Iraqi forces in 1980 during the Iran-Iraq War. The city fended off troops for 34 days before the Iraqis finally occupied it. Inside a mosque that is famous for its resistance to the foreign occupation, Farzaneh noticed an oversight.

“I walked in and I saw a ton of portraits of men as being the martyrs and people that sacrifice everything. But there was not a single photograph of women,” Farzaneh told KGOU’s World Views.

University of Oklahoma Vice President for Weather and Climate Programs, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences Dean, and National Weather Center director Berrien Moore talks with Suzette Grillot about his involvement with last year’s Paris Climate Conference, and some of the domestic politics surrounding climate change.

But first, Joshua Landis provides an update on the Middle East, including the latest on the fight against ISIS in the Iraqi city of Mosul.

The U.S. Department of Defense says an Army soldier from Oklahoma is the first military casualty while fighting militants with the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

The DoD said in a news release Friday Master Sgt. Joshua Wheeler was killed Thursday in Iraq. The 39-year-old native of Roland died from wounds sustained by enemy small-arms fire during a hostage rescue.

Rebecca Cruise and Suzette Grillot discuss the former military dictator who’s about to take over for Goodluck Jonathan as Nigeria’s new president, and two dozen looted religious artifacts recently returned to Italy.

Then, Rebecca talks with war photographer Ashley Gilbertson. His most recent book, Bedrooms of the Fallen, depicts the homes of men and women who died in Iraq and Afghanistan to remember how they lived, rather than how they died.

Ashley Gilbertson / Bedrooms of the Fallen, University of Chicago Press

When Ashley Gilbertson was 13 years old, his parents bought him his first camera to photograph himself and his friends skateboarding. A year later, his photos were published in a skateboarding magazine.

“That feeling of seeing something happen, take a photograph of it, and then see it in a magazine … [it] was totally addictive. It’s magical,” said Gilbertson, who grew from photographing skateboarding to become a war photographer.

In 2003, the Associated Press issued its report on human rights abuses taking place at the U.S.-held Abu Ghraib prison. Jackie Spinner was at the prison a year later to report on the story for The Washington Post when she was nearly kidnapped by Al-Qaeda members.

“It was June 14, 2004. It’s a day I’ll never forget,” Spinner said.

The event inspired the title for her 2006 book about her experiences reporting in Iraq during the war, Tell Them I Didn’t Cry.

Joshua Landis compares what he calls the “Great Sorting Out” in the Middle East to historical conflicts in Eastern Europe that also stretched across ethnic and religious lines.

Then Joshua and Rebecca Cruise talk with Matthew Barber. He was one of the first bloggers to write about the capture of thousands of Yazidi women and girls as the minority community of northern Iraq was wiped out this summer.

In the Iraqi province of Kurdistan, women of the Yazidi ethnic minority are disappearing. At the most recent count, between 6,000 and 7,000 women and girls have been kidnapped, and many of those have been enslaved.

When Matthew Barber visited northern Iraq earlier this year, his goals were to conduct research and learn Kurdish. When he arrived he was faced with an enslavement crisis unfolding all around him and he knew that being an American academic gave him resources he could use to help.

In recent years, millions have been killed or forced to flee their homes due to instability and violence across Iraq and Syria. Among these victims are many ethnic and religious minorities, including Christians and Yazidis.

When the Sunni extremists declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria, their ranks swelled to about 30,000 fighters, according to estimates by the CIA. The recent airstrikes carried out by the U.S.-led coalition might change the rush to join the self-declared Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

But for those who have already signed on, leaving the Islamic State is terrifying, says one young Syrian defector.

Syria, Russia, and Iran have condemned the plan to lead a broad coalition against the Islamic State President Obama outlined Wednesday night, stating that without a UN resolution U.S. action in Syria would be an act of aggression and in violation of international law.

The beheading of American journalist James Foley this week is the latest in a series of brutal attacks in Iraq and Syria perpetrated by the Islamic State (ISIS).

The killing comes in response to President Obama's decision to provide aerial and tactical support to Iraqi government forces and Kurdish Peshmerga as they attempt to retake areas seized by IS in recent weeks.

The so-called “light footprint strategy” has been a hallmark of President Obama’s military engagement strategy as he pulled U.S. troops out of Iraq and winds down the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. That drawdown of massive units of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and civilian support staff means a stronger reliance on smaller, more elite military groups.

Joshua Landis joins Suzette Grillot for a conversation about the situation in Iraq and the U.S. response to the escalating violence by Sunni militants.

And Rebecca Cruise and University of Oklahoma Iranian Studies professor Afshin Marashi speak with Mohamad Tavakoli, a professor of history and Near and Middle Eastern civilizations at the University of Toronto. He studies Persianate society – arguing that in the pre-modern world, Iranians, the Ottoman Empire, the South Asian Indian Mogul empire, and even Central Asians all spoke a common language.

Suzette Grillot, Joshua Landis, and Rebecca Cruise discuss this week's national elections in Iraq, and the growing ethnic tensions and violence in Western China.

Later, a conversation with historian and geographer Abigail Neely. Tuberculosis and HIV co-infection is one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest health challenges, but she questions how closely they’re related, and how poverty affects the immune system.